A very large picture of a wild horse.

A picture of a very large wild horse.
There are many things I cannot talk about here.
They plucked things from my body I cannot remember
I cannot talk about here.

A brief picture of a very modern horse.

A long, thin bird with eyes is watching us here.
Patients here have the large eyes of very modern horses.

Sometimes, when at an intersection we are made to cross
into another less sick world.
At intersections perhaps our eyes are the small confused eyes
of very tiny animals.

Sometimes we evolve and can touch each other again.
At first, it hurts.

Sometimes we evolve and can have no way to speak here.
Animals can be our voices and we can touch them sometimes
at intersections once.

“Writing a rage postcard in a ritual for leaving is like how a machine for
electricity is an expression of draught,” my caseworker says.

“The direction of your apathy is infinite,” she says

*

My caseworker said she once urinated on the moon. When
she was tiny and her legs were full of bee stings.

When she turns on her fog machine, she narrates a scene
from my early childhood. The one where I vanished into a
supermarket and never found my way out.

*

My caseworker says “I once met a woman who could join
her breath with an animal’s.

Once, she slowed the breath of that animal.

I am that animal.”

*

My caseworker is drunk on her own orthodoxy.
Sharpening her teeth on her prayers, she is at the foot of my
bed dressed in a tablecloth.

She prays for the drunkard and the dispossessed.

If she really knew how read a room, she would know my
convulsions are pregnant with violence.

If I wasn’t bound at the feet then I could unmask her. I
could slice open her belly like a fish and let her bleed out.

*

Our caseworkers think they can peel us open with their
impossibly well-meaning words.

If my caseworker doesn’t leave me alone, I will blot out her
beautiful eyes with my sacramental teeth.

*

I really think it’s terrible the way we’ve tied and gagged our
caseworkers.

It’s really horrible the way we’ve left them in the orchard
with bouquets of witch hazel blooming out of their mouths.

Remember when I made that tincture out of funeral root and distilled
ether?

There was a flock of feral birds hovering over our medicinals and you were
working on a screenplay involving the Universal Mother

or else you were creating complex itineraries involving the Universal
Mother. We were outside The Library of Miniature Dresses practicing other
peoples’ animal voices.

Either I was sharpening my jasmine blade or I was digging for edible roots.

“I can talk to my deities without spilling weapons everywhere,” you said.
You were reading a book called Think Life is Coming and I was tracing a
passage from The Doll Tome. It said:

The Doll Tome is part orthodoxy, part heresy. For example, to become an
expert with blades, to become a heresy artist and to know how to fine-tune
your blades, one must enter through the passages of The Doll Tome.”

At prayer time we stab magazines and stick our fingers down our
throats. In a ritual for becoming more domesticated, we receive important
questions by reading extended passages from The Doll Tome.

The Doll Tome is part hymnal part science fiction. Part romance novel and
part instruction manual.

How I am taking up with the fauna is a rumor I once heard while reading a
passage from The Doll Tome. How one must drown her gods in a sea of
infinite Doll Tomes is another.

I was my own sort of hardcore Christ when I licked a poster of the goddess
and threw my Doll Tome out the window.

The Doll Tome is part weapon and part gestalt. Part spell book and part
hallucination. One can make a sort-of garment by taping together pages
from The Doll Tome.

Outside the library of miniature dresses we are practicing our cemetery
voices or we are posing in the very psychological postures of a bird

and I am reading my favorite passage from The Doll Tome.

It says: “You are the light memorized by the field in a wilderness of small
animals and chandeliers.”

Inside the library they are showing reels of historical animal footage:

A flock of antiseptic birds breathe through the grasses.

One hundred thousand landscapes containing deer.

Everyday fish iconography.

The voice-over is licking grass and biting through trees or biting birds
between the snow. “Every ant contains a portion of my terror,” he explains,
rubbing his eyelids with soil and repeating his favorite passage from The
Doll Tome:

“Between sleep a torrent of grief is scattered over our hearts. But when I
turn toward you, my secrets are identical to yours.”

I draw a fake effigy. “Who let us into hell?” It says.

I found out my diagnosis included “writes in a violent penmanship.”

My target weight was 100 tiny mammals.

The day my fingers scratched a hold through your postcard, my target
weight was moss and pieces of ugly rock.

I found out my diagnosis included, “up all night singing ugly songs about
fish.”

My target weight was ghosts and a measurable pulse.

“Reading recipes she finds under her mattress,” my diagnosis was “a victim
absorbed into her aggressor.”

My goal weight was a severed head and eight pounds of wild strawberries.

Once, in a pale room, my target weight was a 50 foot electrical cord.

Under fire for giving testimonies near a far-off bridge, I was labeled an
“insolent traitor.” My diagnosis included “speaks in made-up voices about
imaginary things.”

When they found me absolutely smashed in the nurse’s lounge, my target
weight was a repulsive widow.

My diagnosis was upgraded to account for an outbreak of starvation tactics
in the ward.